Richard Meier and the Getty Center.
This is what you get, when you mix great photography with great architecture with great flash design: Amy Barkow Photography. Sometimes the mix can be
transcendent.
[via QBN/Honest]
Land+Living ponders Has Dwell jumped the shark?. my opinion? most def.
No real numbers on architecture costs, material costs, construction costs etc… and if there are, they are certainly not honest numbers. This is the single most problematic thing about Dwell, in my opinion. Dwell used to be more then just another arch.mag. There was always a utilitarian, common-man thread in the mag. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of this spirit like the David and Im Shafer’s One Space apartment piece (inspired). The articles, architecture and photos are always top-notch, I love Dwell. They feature projects that no one else is covering. Reading Dwell is always a treat, but there’s something missing. Could you afford any of the houses in this mag? probably not.
Dwell doesn’t ask the tough questions, like: why does prefab still cost more then building your own custom house, why does most well-designed green tech cost 3 times more then conventional (green tax?). Why does that featured kitchen cost 300k but the article even attempts to mention the word ‘affordable’ (Poggenpohl – with no price mentioned)? There are a million other questions that go unanswered.
The ads are relentless, current issues are 2 and almost 3 times the size of issues from 5 years ago (i call this the “wired” syndrome). I’d love to do the “Noam Chomsky New York Times ad cutout experiment” on Dwell. And ads for Hummers, who exactly is the target market?
What happened? i’d say it’s the money.
I’m heated about Dwell, because I like it so much. It’s hard to let it go. And the editors have expressed these same sentiments in brief glimpses. Dwell is on a trajectory, like it or not. How long you stay with the current incarnation of the mag, is most likely inversely related to how strongly you felt about it back when you first started reading Dwell. It’s still a great architecture and design showcase, but without real facts accompanying the articles, they just end up being semi-matte puff pieces. If you’re fine with that, then great, enjoy the luxury eye-candy. I do. But… where’s the teeth? My definition of ‘Nice Modernism’ isn’t contrary to ‘Luxury’ but it has a slightly tenuous relationship with it. It keeps a watchful eye over ‘Luxury’, occasionally has fun with it. But in the end “Nice Modernism” is a movement and doesn’t get caught up in the insular, narcissistic world that Luxury often creates.
Let’s Hope that Dwell’s editors keep her “Nice”.
I’m fascinated by small living spaces. David and Im’s “One Space” is way cool. it was featured in Dwell’s May07 issue. I’ve been thinking about doing something like this in the Bucerias/Sayulita area for awhile now. Very small spaces (around 600 sq. feet) sharing a common lot, minimalist construction with warm mexican touches. I’m still in the formulatin’ stage, but this could be so much fun. who’s down?
Marcia and I have been living in our apartment for about a year and half now. To say we hate the furniture that the apartment came with would be the understatement of the year. I’d love to have a huge bonfire with the furniture if I could. Unfortunately, that’s not gonna happen.
We’ve grown so detestful, we’ve decided to either buy it from our landlady (and burn it) or put the dough up to stick the god-awful crap in storage. One of the moves toward doing so is to buy new furniture. New furniture is either crappily designed or way too expensive (or both). if you think american furniture prices are redonkulous, you should try buying it here in Mex. Ikea hasn’t exactly made it into Mexico yet.
So we’ve decided to design our own furniture and have it built. Tomorrow we have a meeting in Guadalajara with the carpentry shop we visited last time (where I shot The Doors). In anticipation of the meeting I have designed a bookshelf system with four modular units, eight drawer like cubes to accompany the bookshelves, a work table that is integrated into the bookshelves (non-fixed) and a tv unit.
For this series, I’ve liberally appropriated the feel of a bookshelf in my old house in LA that was designed and built by RM Schindler. His bookshelf was my jumping off point to something very modernist, yet warm and functional. Having paged through Eames Design, I looked to the Eameses for simplicity and a hint or two of George Nelson as well.
Each unit will be made from 3/4 inch maple plywood and finished with wood wax. The drawer units will have accent colors in the light blue/green range, with one panel of red in the bookshelf, just for fun (made from laminate). I love plywood. it’s one of the most interesting and beautiful surfaces. My old house had whole rooms covered with the stuff as a finishing surface. For the functionality of the bookshelves, I designed them to be stand-alone units in case we moved into a new apartment or house and the dimensions needed to be changed. The modular units can be stacked any which way, horizontally or vertically and the work table which relies on the bookshelf for one of it’s legs can adapt seamlessly to the bookshelf being in either position. The work table and tv unit table surface will be made from cutting plywood into 4cm strips and putting the strips on their sides, so the grain is showing and then glue the strips together and sand. So that, in essence, the table surface is the grain from all those pieces of wood being sandwiched together. beautiful.
This is my first attempt at designing furniture and most surely not the last. I’m not sure how long it will take to build the pieces, but I thought I’d upload the sketches I’ll be presenting to the carpenter tomorrow. It could all be a big crap shoot, but I love the idea of creating furniture from relatively cheap materials. My big insecurity is that I don’t have the engineering know-how to really pull off the level of detail I have in my mind, plus working with a carpentry shop three hours away, I can’t sit over the carpenters’ shoulders. It’s definitely one big learning experience.
In my little slice of Mexico there ain’t much shopping to be done. This is a good thing. No Sunday afternoon trips to the mall, no ridiculously large amounts of billboards showing off the next new must-have objects you don’t need, no slick gap ads, no if-you-buy-this-it-will-make-you-prettier-and-skinnier” ads. But on the other side of the coin, it’s hard to find good sources of inspiration past the internets and the culture around me. And mexican culture is by far the most inspiring thing in my life, but every now and then i ache for some good education on design, architecture, music, writing, art, etc… Recently, I found amazon.com again, after a few years of being weened off the amazon teet*. Somehow through sheer stumbling I realized that it’s insanely easy to get amazon shipped here to Mexico, direct to my address in about a week and a half. This is by far the fastest anything has been sent to me via my mexican street address or by a postal remailing service we have in Texas (usually takes at least a month and a half). Concurrently, I stumbled upon amazon’s trove of good art books and over the past few weeks I’ve been indulging in just a few good ones. As I sit here in my apartment on Sunday morning, i feel a connectedness in spirit, peering through the works/writings/architecture/design of Charles and Ray Eames, Barry McGee, Thomas Campbell, George Nelson, Alexander Girard, Ari Marcopolous, Margaret Kilgallen, Ricardo Legoretta, Craig Stecyk, Mike Mills, David Carson, Ed Templeton, Chris Johanson, Milton Glaser, Luis Barragán, John Hodgman, Hunter Davies, Mark Gonzales, Phil frost, Steven Powers and many more.
* There happens to be an amazing book store in Guadalajara called “Ghandi” that has tons of great art, design and architecture books but most are printed in spanish and so it’s a bit harder to justify putting down all that green for a book that’s past my language level. although I did buy the Luis Barragán book there and The Beatles biography by Hunter Davies (good book!).
The last time we were in Guadalajara I came across a book called the “Guia Arquitectonica Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara” or The Architecture Guide to the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara. It’s a great architecture guide published by the government of the state of Jalisco. The book organizes the cities into neighborhoods and then goes through each of the fifteen or so neighborhoods and points out architecturally significant buildings and monuments one by one. Each listing has a picture, an address and a small summary of who the architect was, the year it was built and anything special that elevates the building above the fray. There are about 300 listings in the book.
As I was casually reading the guide, I came upon several houses architected by Luis Barragán. I immediately went ploughing through the book looking for other mid-century modernist style buildings and architects, trying to glean what I could from the scholarly spanish summaries of each house. Connecting all the houses to the various neighborhoods and learning about the other modernist architects working in Guadalajara, admittedly I didn’t know anyone besides Barragán. A light went off in my head and I realized it would a great experience to go and seek all these buildings out. To actually use the guide – for what it is – a guide.
Marcia and I went out and got our own copy of the book and marked 20 or so buildings we wanted to visit, I grabbed the camera and a nice wide-angle lens and we set off to learn more about the modernist architecture of Guadalajara.
We learned so much that afternoon. I was introduced to the earlier work of Luis Barragán, face to face, in some situations the houses have been altered considerably and in one, the house was boarded up and looked to be vacant. Some of his houses still remain unscathed and one or two have been restored faithfully and are on display to the public. I was also introduced to the works of Alejandro Zohn, Felix Aceves, Ignacio Diaz Moralez and Rafael Urzöa, as well as the work of several un-named architects and engineers whose work has come to exemplify a modernist ideal that briefly flowed through certain neighborhoods in mid-century Guadalajara.
It was like peeling back an impenetrable layer of concrete, to see wonderful, enlightened architecture whose idea and ideals I share. It was like finding a community of like minded individuals who had been here before me. Every other house I saw I was convinced I was going to buy, one day and fix it up, especially the Barragán house that had been boarded up and basically left to rot.
I’ve posted 31 photos to Flickr and carefully annotated each photo with specifics taken from the guide and general impressions Marcia and I had, while visiting each building. A very special thanks to the folks who edited and wrote the Guia Arquitectonica Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara. This is my hommage to the modernist architects of Guadalajara.
and so, let’s begin…
The last time we were in Guadalajara, my parents and I were sourcing building materials for the house they are building in Vallarta and for the one we are building in Sayulita. One thing that always interested us, is the idea of using rescued wood from old haciendas. We hired a local guide who took us to a carpentry factory that specializes in reusing old wood. They had beautifully designed furniture as we learned most of the wood came from old doors. The manager took us through various parts of the factory and then out to the yard where they kept their supply of wood.
It was like walking into a time machine. The manager lead us into an entire storage yard filled with old hacienda doors, large and small. It was like going to a very old library of old paint, chipped, rusted and busted doors. And the guy could look at any piece of wood and tell me what part of mexico it was from and a possible date, encyclopedic knowledge flowed from his mouth. I was in awe.
For most people it would probably just have been a large yard filled with semi-rotting doors. To me it was like stepping into a whole in a wall record joint like A-1 Record Finders, with stacks and stacks of old vinyl. Years of treasures to sift through. History, collected. The history of all these old doors hung high in the air and beauty was everywhere. It was amazing.
My friend Paulina is a concierge for one of the local resort groups. Her job is to cater to all the ridiculously childish whims of the jet-set. In other worlds, she’s a babysitter for very rich people. The group she works for own several amazing houses in a residential development in a small town just north of where I live. Word to Big-Bird: rich people don’t stay in hotels anymore, that’s so 2005 – they belong to resort clubs and get to stay in architectural mansions all over the world. One of the houses was recently finished and Pau asked some of our friends if we’d like to come up and test the house out for an night. To make sure that everything was up to standard. We grabbed some food-provisions, bathing suits, a change of clothes and some hooch and headed up to the manse.
The location is insane, perched atop a small hill with views of the nearby town, the bay and Vallarta in the distance. The house is in what I call the “pacific coast mexican style” of architecture, slightly Mediterranean, with tons of concrete and marble mixed with very organic materials like raw wood posts with vine wrappings and palapa roofs with pergolas on the terraces and mexican hardwoods used for all the carpentry. A very modern style but also warm and organic. I’d say the house was easily in the 4 to 5 million dollar range. If I had to guess.
The jacuzzi and the pool became our group center as we chatted the night away, through drinks, food, drinks, more food and more drinks, nobody with anything more on than a bathing suit for good measure. The sunset was incredible and the moonlight sky as well. I took the opportunity to try out the camera photographing the beautiful architectural details of the house.
In the morning we woke, ate a huge breakfast prepared by the three wonderful ladies who take care of the house and then prepared to leave our wonderful hideaway. Paulina then begged us to stay longer, so we played hooky from work and spent most of the day hanging out in the pool. When it was time to go, we were all sad to have to leave such a wonderful place. We gathered for a few minutes to load Paulina up with our thoughts and suggestions regarding the “testing” portion of our visit. We thanked her for a much needed and quite unexpected mini-vacation and headed back down to our normal lives (in paradise).
Thanks again, Pau!
We were in Guadalajara, this past weekend, hanging with Marcia’s family once again. It was a nice, small, quick trip this time. On Saturday we had lunch with Marcia’s abuelita (grandmother), Margarita. She is the matriarch of the family and a strict catholic, so an introduction has been long in the waiting and handled gently. All went well as she occasionally held my hand and patted my knee. We got along great with small conversation and big smiles.
Margarita lives with her eldest daughter and granddaughters in a brand-spanking new gated residential community called “Chapalita Residencial”, a geometric puzzle that if you were to un-focus your eyes, would look like various combinations of tiny boxes, sort of like a three-dimensional crossword puzzle with color. Or maybe something out of mondrian painting gone horribly awry.
I had always seen Chapalita from a bridge close-by, it’s blocks of color, the same 5 or 6 basic shapes interlocking in 20 different ways. As we entered the security gates and pulled on to the entrance boulevard, I knew that I’d have to take a few minutes to take some photos.
The houses are all jammed together in matching blocks of color and brick. Everything seems to be in 3/4 size, as the houses look small, the parking areas look small, the roads even smaller. It’s as if the “bigger is better” concept had never reached this place and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but please let me explain further. It seemed as if every space from public to inside the houses themselves had been re-engineered to allow for the smallest possible area usage. From the width of the staircase to the length of the parking spot, when empty all looks great but with usage it’s like watching a cartoon of an overly packed suitcase with all the clothing seeping out the sides. This is a case of ultra-maximization of peso per square meter usage of space.
Chapalita feels like it was made by Ikea. Seemingly interesting design, but thoroughly missing any underlying details. As if no one had used it prior to putting it together. Something like this would be gorgeous if done in Sweden or Japan, but here in Mexico it just doesn’t have the detail in either the engineering work or the finishing detail to make the “less is more” approach work. In this case, less is, well, less. As with other developments in the past, this one offers that brief glimpse of utopian hope that you get from owning something brand-new and clean. I wondered to myself as I walked the clean, car-less streets and rows of empty houses, what will this place look like with 5 to 10 years of neglect.
I found these cone looking things made out of woven tree vines at a nearby “vivero” (plant nursery), the plant is called “pato de elefante”. I have never seen the planters before, so when I happened upon them, I knew instantly that they would be a very beautiful touch to the palapa. I put four of the cones together and tied them to one of the wood pillars of the palapa on the terrace near the pool.
It’s the little touches that count.
We are in the last throes of finishing up the house in Punta de Mita and the owners are due for arrival on Monday. Nothing quite like an imminent deadline looming, we’re working furiously to finish up all those last minute time consuming details or in other words we’ve been trying to cram a month’s worth of work into the past two weeks. I’ve been managing the crew, the past couple of days, and it’s been so much fun being back out on the job site after having spent most of the last 5 months or so, behind a computer designing the marketing material for our other project (which is coming along nicely and shall have a debut of it’s own very soon). This is the point in the project where you can see the most dramatic results. and it’s definitely the most gratifying. My job is basically to answer a hundred and one detail and design questions and to make things happen as easy as possible. There is no shortage of “what the hell are we gonna do” moments, when a problem comes up that looks like it can’t be ironed out easily. With our design instincts and the crew’s craftsmanship and knowledge of materials, we always end up coming to some kind of compromise that makes the potential disaster work out ten times better. With our crew and anywhere from three to four vendors (a/c, electrical, plumbing, wood work) on site all day, people can get in each other’s way, and it’s my job to make sure everyone is taken care of and can do their job as best they can. Mary and are the pickiest of bosses and no little detail is missed, questions come all day long as the crew have come to an understanding that all tiny design questions are better asked, then redone later. We are most certainly perfectionists but we also have a good understanding of the mexican saying “only god makes things perfect”.
On one of our trips to Guadalajara, Marcia and I found the most amazing clay lamp shades (I guess that’s what you would call them), here they are called “lamparas”. They are a pretty standard outdoor wall lighting feature in Mexico, but these are special. There is no hint of mass-production and you can literally see the cuts in the clay where the shapes were made by hand. They have a boxy feel to them, almost like something you might see in Arizona or New Mexico. They are much simpler and low profile then the ones I see around and add an interesting design element to the mix. They’re what I would call a perfect example of warm, organic mexican modernism. Yesterday I prepared the lamps by coating them with a sealer and then measured and drilled the walls and hung all 20 of them. The crew appreciated my effort and I was glad to lend a (working) hand.
These are the first in a series of images I’ll be posting over the next month or so. I’ve been documenting the construction of a house we are building in Punta de Mita. These images are a first attempt at capturing some of the more finished architectural aspects of the house, playing with angles, light and color.
note to self: I really gotta get a better camera, this little point-n-shoot just ain’t hackin’ it.
The early entry on my trip through NYC got me thinking about my Uncle Tim. In 2001, I made another trip to NY, to see a house he had just finished on Washington Street, in Manhattan, for the guy who founded VH1. As I walked through the house taking photos i was blown away by his craftsmanship and mastery of materials. I immediately put together a little slideshow of the photos and posted it to my old blog: ed-one.com
It’s years later now, and that site is no longer around, so as I re-read that entry I decided to revisit those photos. And so, here they are:
Tim’s house on washington street
Architected, designed and built by my uncle Tim Seggerman and his Inca Building Workshop, this house is a living sculpture, once a public bus garage, it’s now a sprawling 5 story residence with lower floor retail space. It took Tim four years to complete the project. He spent the entire time, inside the building, designing every last little inch of space. 90% of the fixtures, wood work and furniture were designed by Tim and fabricated in the basement shops he set up. Tim is truly a master of materials. and a complete perfectionist. This piece of work is only rivaled by the current house he is working on in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Tim is a genius and an inspiration for my entire family.
enjoy!
I like conferences like I like the plague. but the Dwell Magazine – PREFAB NOW conference is looking mighty cool. I may just have to figure out an excuse to go to LA for the weekend, just to go to this. I’m a prefab junkie and I’ve been thinking of ways to get prefab rocking down here in Puerto Vallarta. The price tag for the conference is a bit steep, but it would be so much fun to go.
[hat tip to jason fields].
Hi, my name is Ed. In my life I've lived in Philly, New York, Wisconsin, Berkeley and Los Angeles. That was then. Now I live in coastal Nayarit Mexico. I've been living here for 6 years now (!). In these pages I write about and photograph my daily experience which includes a lot of surfing and mexican beach town street life. I also post about things I find interesting: art, design, photography, music, tech, etc...